Friday, July 06, 2012

Impact

It's a month since Ray Bradbury shuffled off this mortal coil. At the SFRA conference in Detroit last week, several conversations involved "where were you when you heard the news" threads, a bit like "where were you when you heard that JFK was assassinated?" or "where were you when you heard about the Challenger disaster?"

The actual announcement of Bradbury's death was quite low key: a relative tweeted it, but it took a couple of hours for the more formal news services to pick up on it. Around this time, there wasn't much information being given, so people started casting around. Nothing shows the impact of the man's passing as much as the "hit counter" on this very blog. You can see the day of Bradbury's death quite clearly, as the normal level of traffic is thoroughly dwarfed: